City of Gold’s Jonathan Gold on His Star Turn

There’s a moment in City of Gold, the new documentary directed by Laura Gabbert about the renowned Los Angeles Times food critic Jonathan Gold, when the camera observes the writer at work. Gold, decked out in his signature suspenders, frizzy ginger hair brushing his shoulders, hulks over a tiny laptop, pecking out his next piece. Follow his fingers and you may notice that a key is missing. Look closely and you’ll realize it’s the letter “F.”

“You are so perceptive!” Gold exclaims with a harrumph of amusement, when I get him on the phone to discuss the documentary. “It makes it so hard to swear . . .”

“Or to write about food?” I suggest.

“Oh, yeah,” he says. “That hadn’t occurred to me.”

If you live in Los Angeles, or you’ve spent any extended time there (I fall into the latter camp), you may be familiar with Jonathan Gold’s 101, the compendium of the area’s best restaurants that the critic dutifully compiles each year. It’s the definitive guide to dining in L.A., in no small part because, per the 2015 edition, it’s as likely to include “that tiny storefront next to the 7-Eleven” as the latest “Beverly Hills gastronomic palace.”

City of Gold explores many sides of its subject. We see the writer as a devoted father to his two children and an adoring husband to his newspaper editor wife, Laurie Ochoa, whom he still, after decades of marriage, likes to meet for a midday taco-truck meal. He’s a “failed cellist” but a lover of music, and an erstwhile music editor whose early career had him chronicling the rise of West Coast hip-hop in the ’80s. And he’s a Pulitzer-winning journalist—the first to secure that honor for food writing, largely because of his laser focus on L.A.’s regional immigrant food cultures—who also happens to be an inveterate procrastinator; 30 years in and he still can’t nail a deadline.

Most of all, the film is a love letter to Los Angeles, the place where Gold was born and raised and, excepting a stint in New York when he worked at Gourmet in the early aughts, where he has made his life. Gabbert paints her subject as a sort of amiable flavor-crazy flaneur, roaming his beloved city in an ancient Dodge pickup—the “single most polluting vehicle in Consumer Reports” the year he bought it, he admits sheepishly—and delivering a running commentary on the unexpected culinary offerings of every mini mall he passes. Gold guides us down highways and byways to access L.A.’s farthest corners, its holiest-hole-in-the-walls. We watch him eat, intently and joyously, and he introduces us to the restaurateurs whose mom-and-pop operations have benefited enormously from his patronage and praise.

The word that comes to mind is delightful, and that goes for City of Gold, its star, and my experience chatting with him.

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Jonathan Gold in City of Gold

Photo: Goro Toshima / Courtesy of Sundance Selects

You’re the subject of this documentary, not its director, so I’m not sure if I should say congratulations? Tell me a little bit about how the project came about.

I think you’re the first person to put it that way. It’s like asking a vase of flowers what it thinks about the painting. It’s like, Oh! I look like peonies?

I’d been saying no to most reality-TV stuff. Laura Gabbert, the director of the film, actually won dinner with me in a silent auction at her kids’ school. And we went to the first iteration of LudoBites, the Ludo Lefebvre pop-up. She broached the subject. I brushed her off, but she kept calling. My son ended up going to the same school her kids went to, and when you see somebody every day in the drop-off line, it suddenly becomes harder to brush them off. And I really had liked her documentary Sunset Story an awful lot.

How did it feel to watch City of Gold?

I assume it’s always uncomfortable to watch oneself on-screen, but I thought that she captured the way I look at Los Angeles really nicely. It was less the food on the plate—though there’s certainly that—and [more] the journey, the idea that in Los Angeles you’re always driving from one place to another, you’re always going across this vast swath of territory and alighting in a place that is quite probably completely different from the place where you started. I think my favorite scene in the film is the one where I’m stuck in the traffic as the sun is setting, on the Harbor Freeway, with that great Funkadelic song on. Watching the light change on the San Gabriel Mountains. To me that’s so much of what Los Angeles is about, that almost feeling of satori in traffic.

As a New Yorker, it confirmed a lot of biases. Do you spend as much time in your car as it appears you do?

I spend an awful lot of the day in my car. I go to the office, then I’ll go to restaurants, then I pick up my kids from school, then I drive to another place. When I lived in New York as the restaurant critic for Gourmet, I had that truck parked in the big garage at the end of Houston, and I probably took it out three times a year. In Los Angeles you’re always in your car. And you get to a point where it becomes less an obstacle and more a way of being.

You discuss in the film being hyperaware as a kid of food and class, specifically who went to which Jewish deli and how that telegraphed status. I’m curious about your palate: When did you learn to be an adventurous eater?

I suppose if I was going to have to put a date on it, it would be my senior year of high school. I had a Chinese girlfriend, and her mother was the head of the chemistry department at a local university, but she came home and cooked four dishes. I probably ended up going out with Maryanne for a year longer than I should have because her mom was such a good cook.

Did you eat a lot of Americanized Chinese food growing up?

That sort of Jewish Sunday night Chinese food. But it was a somewhat earlier time, and almost all the Chinese restaurants in L.A.—or New York, for that matter—had cooks whose families had been in the U.S. for many, many generations. Things opened up with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, and they really opened up in 1986, when Reagan, of all people, signed an immigration liberalization treaty. We started to see people from all over the world pouring into Los Angeles: from every state of Mexico, from Central America, and of course from Asia. Suddenly, Los Angeles, which at one point in its history had been nicknamed “Iowa by the Sea,” became the center of immigration, at least on the West Coast. [It was] where the most cultures were cramming in in the most haphazard ways, I think.

What’s the line for you in eating between if something is “good” and if something is “interesting”?

I don’t know. For example, there was a place that I used to love, down near USC, a Creole restaurant, totally unreconstructed. People would come in there from the same neighborhood in Louisiana. There were community newspapers from Louisiana. The food was delicious. But I always got food poisoning—I wasn’t going to write about that, as interesting as the situation was.

What about when you’re not seeking a place to write about?

I’m always seeking a place to write about. One only has so many meals in a week. It’s true that there are a half dozen places I go back and back to. I suppose the places I keep returning to, the thing they might have in common, is one great dish. When I’m in a city that’s not Los Angeles and I’m sitting through some $800 27-course dinner for a piece I’m writing, will I dream about the avocado salsa at Ciro’s? Yes. Will I daydream about the imperial rolls at Golden Deli? Yes. Will I dream about the pasta at Mozza with squash blossoms and ricotta? Yeah!

I’m starving.

I’ve done my job.

You speak a little bit about anonymity in the film and how you don’t really have it anymore. Was it a concern that the film would blow whatever was left?

Huge. Obviously. But I’d sort of decided that it needed to go anyway. I mean, if you’re a critic, the restaurateurs know who you are. There’s usually like a three-month window. When I was in New York at Gourmet, I pretty much got away with it for the first two and a half months. There was one meal at Babbo: I was eating with one of the editors and she didn’t want to eat at 9:30, so she called and bigfooted her way to a better reservation. Suddenly, every restaurant in New York that needed to know who I was knew who I was.

One of the most interesting parts for me was when you discussed learning to describe abstract sensation. You learned it in terms of music, but it actually helped you to write about food. That’s such an interesting idea.

As a food writer I thought that was my weakness when I first started. I was really good at getting you into the room. I was good at the culture context stuff. I was entertaining, but I thought my food descriptions were the weakest part. It may be the only thing I’ve ever consciously worked at, like Kobe practicing 10,000 free throws a day. I have the idea that I want somebody to experience food in the way that I experience it. And sometimes you can do it with physical descriptions, a lot of times you’ve got to use allusions. There aren’t that many words that you use to describe food: There’s nothing else that means crisp, there’s nothing else that means salty. You can say something’s briny, saline, tastes like the sea—but those are super clichéd. Being able to put somebody in the position where they aren’t just hearing the word salty, but they’re feeling the sensation of salt. It does have certain similarities with describing the way that a song sounds, describing the recordings of both the Guarneri and the Juilliard quartets playing Beethoven 131. You could do it the cheap way by saying one was brooding or dark, but you could use a metaphor and somebody would really feel it.

Switching gears: What are your weekend plans? Is there any culture, food or otherwise, that you’re interested in consuming?

This weekend I intend to drive to Orange County to eat Vietnamese food. Specifically I’m looking for the ideal example of banh xeo that I can find. And I’m looking forward to hearing a concert by the composer Carl Stone.

Where will that be?

In a club in Little Tokyo on Saturday night. He’s an L.A.-born composer who spends a lot of his time in Tokyo, and his music uses a lot of appropriations. He’ll take samples and he’ll twist them into things you’ve never heard before. He just opens up time in this marvelous way that I’ve never heard another composer do. It’s a dream when he plays in town, only once a year or so.